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KYLE A. THOMAS
Scholar | Director | Actor
"Theatre requires the interrogation of that relationship between performance and audience--an act in transcending space to promote the sacred bonds found in community gathered together to glean meaning from story and action."
St. Louis Stories | The Station Theatre (2017)
THE LIFE LIVED THEATRICALLY
Kyle specializes in theatre history, directing theory, and methodologies that champion theatre as an act of community-building in the 21st century. Building upon devising techniques learned as a part of studying with Anne Bogart (SITI Company) and Struan Leslie (Royal Shakespeare Company), and working from the foundational dialectal techniques of Bertolt Brecht's Epic Theatre and Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, Kyle continues to redefine theatre as a necessary means of community engagement in an ever-increasing digital world. As a theatre historian, Kyle is inspired by the communally-driven processes of theatrical creation found in medieval Europe, where plays and performances facilitated social interactions, ritual transformation, and provided space for erudite practices. These aspects of medieval theatre serve as the foundational dramaturgy in Kyle's work on stage but also provide the parameters for his current research project: dramaturgical history.
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF THEATRE
BA/BS Theatre Program Coordinator
MISSOURI STATE UNIVERSITY
2019-PRESENT
Courses Taught: Script Analysis | Tools of the Actor | Voice & Movement | Directing | Dramaturgy | Dramatic Theory & Criticism
Directing: Comedy of Errors (2019) | Everybody (2021) | Much Ado About Nothing (2021) | Waiting for Lefty (2023)
ASSOCIATE ADJUNCT PROFESSOR OF THEATRE
UNIVERSITY OF INDIANAPOLIS
2018-2019
Courses Taught: Introduction to Theatre | Introduction to Acting | Speech for the Stage | Script Analysis
Directing: It's a Wonderful Life: The Radio Play (2018, pictured)
INSTRUCTOR OF THEATRE & FILM
PARKLAND COLLEGE
2012-2020
Courses Taught: Theatre Appreciation | Theatre History | Voice & Diction | Film Appreciation | Film History
Directing: Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom (2015, pictured) | How I Became a Pirate (2013) | Mister Paradise (2011)
TEACHING ASSISTANT
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
2011-2018
Courses Taught: Introduction to Theatre | Broadway Musicals & American Culture | Script Analysis | Theatre History
Directing: Viva Verdi! A Night of Italian Opera (2017, pictured)
RESEARCH & PUBLICATIONS
Dramaturgical history
The medieval theatre has much to teach us about building community in our postmodern world.
In the history of theatre, the medieval period of Europe is often considered a "fly-over," a historical space with few, if any, real stops to make or sights to see, as we make our way between the Classical Theatre of ancient Greece and Rome to the early modern theatre of Shakespeare. But studying medieval plays and performance conditions reveal a rich tapestry of practices built on communally-constructed social interactions, affective transformations born of ritual revelation, and models of the human experience balanced between questions of life and after-life.
So why aren't medieval plays produced with more regularity?
The issue is that the medieval theatre marks a distinct new chapter in European dramatic meaning-making. And all along we've used the wrong [i.e. Aristotelian] tools to excavate its efficacy. We must understand what is behind medieval drama before we can bring it forward in the present.
(Pictured: The Play About the Antichrist, University of Illinois, 2013)
PUBLICATIONS
The Play about the Antichrist (Ludus de Antichristo) was composed around 1160 at the imperial Bavarian abbey of Tegernsee, at a critical point in the power-struggle between the papacy and Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. This new translation and commentary reveals this drama to be strikingly representative of the role that theatrical performance played in shaping contemporary politics, diplomacy, and public opinion. It also shows how drama functioned as an integral component of the educational curricula of elite monastic institutions like Tegernsee, where political administrators and diplomats were trained, and how performance served as a common, connective lingua franca among monasteries in twelfth-century Bavaria.
In this new translation, Carol Symes provides the first full and faithful rendering of the play’s dynamic language, maintaining the meter, rhyme scheme, and stage directions of the Latin original and restoring the liturgical elements embedded in the text. Kyle A. Thomas, whose fully-staged production tested the theatricality of this translation, provides a new historical and dramaturgical analysis of the play’s rich interpretive and performative possibilities.
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Only verse translation in any modern language
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Only modern edition to restore liturgical material referenced in the sole medieval text
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Enriched by new historical research that frames the play in its contemporary political and manuscript contexts
Journal Articles, Book Reviews, & Essays
ROMARD: Research on Medieval and Renaissance Drama
Chief Editor
RESEARCH PRESENTATIONS
"Medieval Theatre in Modern Spaces"
Lecture Delivered for the 2021 Helen Damico Memorial Lecture Series
Institute for Medieval Studies
University of New Mexico
"Monks Making Theatre: Towards a More Complete History of Early Medieval Drama"
University of Illinois Program
Program for Medieval Studies
Alumni Lecture Series
PERFORMANCE & PRODUCTION
Actor Training
System-Based Approaches:
- Stanislavsky
- Meisner
- Hagan
Physical Theatre:
- Masked Performance
Voice:
- Linklater
ON-STAGE ACTING
ON-CAMERA ACTING
Director Training
Viewpoints Compositional Technique
- Anne Bogart (SITI Company) - October 2012
Performance-Driven Devised Theatre | PRIFT Technique
- Struan Leslie (RSC) - February 2014
DIRECTING
Click Here for More Directing
I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change
The Champaign-Urbana Theatre Company
February, 2016
